Stressing the importance and the interdisciplinary nature of everyday life, Moran explains that daily “cultural practices” often slip through the “surveillance networks” of society (59). He contends the myth of the “modern triumph of the ‘expert’ over the ‘philosopher,’” dismisses the importance of “compartmentalizing” academics, and speaks to the importance and depth of everyday events (60). Everyday events are inherently interdisciplinary, shaping us, our perceptions, and the way we see and view other disciplines.
In a high school philosophy class, my teacher has asked us, “If we know we’re going to die, why follow the rules? Why be moral?” Which, of course, spawns more questions and frustration than answers. Inevitably, the class devolves into an even more confounding and frustrating cesspool of questions, “What’s the point of being alive? Do we have any impact in the grand scheme of things? Does life have importance?”
In the doctor’s office where I work, the phone rings and my coworker, Flavia, answers. Flavia is an older, Hispanic, take-no-crap kind of woman, who serves as my second mother/gossip buddy. I focus on the tail end of her conversation, “…oh, we’re so sorry. Yes, yes, we’ll pray for you.” When she hangs up, she asks me to get a patient’s chart. In giant, capitalized letters, she scrawls on the top “EXPIRED,” and tsk tsks, “Apparently Ms. Robinson died last night, such a shame. It was a long time coming though, right?” She smiles, tosses the chart on the floor where it lands with a heavy thud between us, and I am thinking of this woman, cancer-riddled and weathered, walking into the office. Already, I can’t remember the specifics: what kind of cancer? Lung? Did she have kids? I don’t remember the answers. We had the chart shredded.
When I think of that classroom discussion and of that day at the office, the two get mixed up. Did I go to the class first, 16 years-old and a cynic, and later laugh with Flavia when she dropped the chart? Or did I see her hang up the phone and feel so jolted that I went into that class and moaned about the pointlessness of morality? The study of everyday life, as Moran reminds us, is inevitably interdisciplinary, because “it forms a kind of connecting glue” between other experiences and fields of study (61). These small events are important because they shape my cynicism when I enter an English class, or philosophy class, or gender studies class, etc etc. Without studying my own everyday life experiences I would not understand the way I view/address other fields of study. And without analyzing everyday life, can we even debate philosophy, a more subjective, anecdote-filled field?